THE WRITING AND TELLING of stories is an inherently social act. You don't whisper a story to a glass of water, you whisper it, eventually, into someone's ear. Stories should be shared. When Life of Pi, my story of a 16-year-old boy named Pi stranded at sea with a Bengal tiger, won the 2002 Man Booker Prize, I was stunned.
Now that The Times in Britain, The Age in Melbourne and my publishers, Canongate and Text, are launching a competition to illustrate a new edition of Life of Pi, I'm excited: it's another way of sharing the story.
Once you put the story out there, it's up to the reader what happens next. How it is interpreted is no longer your affair. I loved the cover picture by Andy Bridge for the first edition as soon as I saw it D, and I told all my foreign publishers that they should take a look at it.Illustrations can only enhance the reader's experience.
There is a wonderful tradition of complementing literature with dramatic images and I believe that images will complement the imagination of the reader of Life of Pi. They will give the book an added quality, not only the aesthetic of the story but also something visual.
For people reading the future edition there will not only be a platform of words for their imagination to jump from, but illustrations, too.
That's what is so exciting about the competition, to see what the people who enter will bring to it and how they will see the book.
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